Response

by Ken MacLeod on May 19, 2015

Thanks, everyone, for all this. It’s gratifying and somewhat bemusing to have my work given so much thought, and such warm appreciation, from contributors like these, and on a site like this. I’m particularly grateful to those who’ve given my books the great and welcome benefit of their critical attention and/or enthusiasm over many years.

I’ve decided to respond to each in turn, in an order that follows the order of the books referred to: Farrell and Shalizi focus mostly on the Fall Revolution books, Walton takes in the Engines of Light trilogy, Harihareswara deals with The Restoration Game and The Human Front, and Mendlesohn covers everything up to Intrusion. There will be references back and forward—some points raised by Farrell and Shalizi, for example, are better answered in relation to later stories. And in my own life, some events that shaped my early books are only explored (and then obliquely, with much misdirection) in later ones.

Like most writers of fiction, including science fiction, what strengths I have are in imaginative rather than analytic thinking. So my explorations of influences below shouldn’t be taken as any pretence that I’ve fully understood them.

Dreams of Reason – response to Farrell

The themes around rationalism in the Fall Revolution books come most directly from sources that are themselves derived from earlier and more fundamental thinking about rational choice, economics, and game theory. So they’re secondary thoughts about (mostly) secondary works, and therefore part of the long-established SF practice of grabbing some bright piece of pop sci and running with it. These sources are for the most part name-checked or heavily signalled in the texts.

Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene and The Blind Watchmaker haunt the pages of The Star Fraction. As I’ve sometimes said for a cheap laugh, I thought at the time that the ideas of Richard Dawkins weren’t getting enough publicity. Robert Axelrod’s The Evolution of Cooperation and David Friedman’s The Machinery of Freedom get a look-in, and in the latter case a shout-out, in The Stone Canal. My notion of fractional reserve banking, about which I would rather not sit an exam, probably came from Murray Rothbard’s For a New Liberty. From Friedman and Rothbard (and Nozick) I appropriated the institutions of anarcho-capitalism in Norlonto and Ship City. (I mixed them with my own labour, honest, with enough and as good left over.)

All of these texts I’d read in the context, as Farrell points out, of the early 1990s collapse of the Soviet bloc and the resurgence of free-market theory and policy—and, of course, the forebodings of that denouement in earlier decades. I’d been worrying away at the economic calculation argument since I first stumbled across it in the 1970s—in that respect David Reid’s experience was mine, though entirely accidental and self-inflicted. In the 1980s I read socialist versions of the calculation argument in Alec Nove’s The Economics of Feasible Socialism and Geoff Hodgson’s The Democratic Economy, and they helped to make sense of living through the Fall of the East.

As is also alluded to in The Star Fraction, Leon Trotsky himself was well aware of the Brutzkus/Mises/Hayek argument, and his criticisms of Soviet planning in the early 1930s follow it part of the way at least. (‘If there existed the universal mind, that projected itself into the scientific fancy of Laplace …’) This may have had consequences under the radar. There never really was a Black Plan, as far as I know, but there were Black Planners. Some old comrades of mine from the International Marxist Group knew all about computers and their possible role in economic planning. They’d already taken on board the market-socialist critique, and they beavered away to influence socialist administrations of various kinds. They started with Livingstone’s London and have long since worked their way up to China. If they ever make it to the ships, it’s game over.

A half-formed hint I threw out in The Star Fraction was that there might be a deep connection between the Hayek-Mises case for the ‘impossibility of socialism’ and Jonathan Searle’s Chinese Room argument for the impossibility of AI. That thought was probably sparked by the depiction of Gosplan in Adam Curtis’s Pandora’s Box BBC series: a room into which pieces of paper arrived, were processed algorithmically, and the results sent out on other pieces of paper, without any necessary connection with the real world or understanding by the human beings in the room of what was being done. Whether there’s anything to that is well above my pay grade, so I hand the question over to the many here for whom it’s probably well below.

I have no eccentric views on global warming, nor on electronic cigarettes.

The robot revolt in morals – response to Shalizi

Cosma Shalizi has outlined the True Knowledge, and traced its possible roots, and its complications and implications, far better than I ever could. Something like it is, as he shows, explicit or implicit in many more rigorous and respectable real-world bodies of thought. Unfortunately I have to admit that my own route to imagining it owed little to any of them.

I got a sharp reminder of this a few days after I first read the contributions here, when I happened to notice that the political philosopher whose portrait is on the classroom wall in Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers is Spinoza. The Amsterdam rationalist wasn’t a direct inspiration of the True Knowledge—though as Shalizi says, he easily could have been. But Heinlein’s novel was—specifically a sentence that (like so many of Heinlein’s) sticks annoyingly in the mind.

Here’s Major Reid, teaching History and Moral Philosophy:

‘To vote is to wield authority; it is the supreme authority from which all other authority derives … Force, if you will!—the franchise is force, naked and raw, the Power of the Rods and the Ax.’

And here’s how that line came to inform the True Knowledge.

In 1997 I’d written my first two novels and left my characters and (I hoped) readers hanging in an unexpected slingshot communist utopia and wondering where it all went from there. I was wondering about that too, with a certain urgency. I’d shoved a shedload of individualist anarchism (Benjamin Tucker et al) into the character of Jon Wilde, and I was still exploring that region when I came across the next twist.

Svein Olav Nyberg, a mathematician and (at the time) an eloquent proponent of Max Stirner’s egoism, was like me working at Edinburgh University and got in touch because he’d enjoyed my books to date. We had many stimulating conversations. Through Svein Olav’s online journal non serviam, I came across the writings of the English autodidact egoist Sid Parker, and thence Dora Marsden. This once influential, now often overlooked feminist, modernist, journalist and editor essentially invented the True Knowledge over a century ago.

All growing life-forms are aggressive: aggressive is what growing means. Each fights for its own place, and to enlarge it, and enlarging it is a growth. And because life-forms are gregarious there are myriads of claims to lay exclusive hold on any place. The claimants are myriad: bird, beast, plant, insect, vermin – each will assert its sole claim to any place as long as it is permitted: as witness the pugnacity of gnat, weed,
and flea, the scant ceremony of the housewife’s broom, the axe which makes a clearing, the scythe, the fisherman’s net, the slaughter-house bludgeon: all assertions of aggressive interest promptly countered by more powerful interests! The world falls to him who can take it, if instinctive action can tell us anything. – The Illusion of Anarchism, The Egoist, No 18, Vol 1, September 15 1914

Elsewhere, I think, she got the bit about how a baby’s smile is a weapon in its struggle for existence, and had a good intuition of how that comes to be. When Benjamin Tucker accused her of ‘archism’ (as opposed, in every sense, to anarchism) she proudly adopted the label. Sid Parker brought Marsden’s iconoclastic thinking to the attention of new readers, and up to date.

As I later wrote, in non serviam #18:

All forms of anarchism, even individualist anarchism, have a moral basis in the rejection of domination. How inconsistent to proclaim ‘the war of all against all’ and to disdain the use of that war machine, the state, when it acts in your interests!

The political applications of this insight are far wider than may be apparent to those whose heads are, as Parker has aptly put it, ‘stuck in the anarchist tar-bucket’. And they are not necessarily conservative, or ‘right-wing’, in their implications. Over the past couple of decades, and partly as a result of libertarian argument, millions upon millions of people have allowed their interests to be sacrificed to ‘the free market’. Like a starving man who believes it is immoral to steal (which it is, but the egoist will always ask ‘So?’) they have put property rights ahead of their property.

The spooks of idealistic socialism have been thoroughly exorcised. But a realistic socialism rests not on morals but on might – and the sovereign franchise, as one of Heinlein’s characters puts it, is might. No egoist should have the slightest qualm about using it, and encouraging others to use it, if it is in his interest to do so. The spooks of libertarianism still haunt the world, and Parker has exposed them as rags on a stick.

I still remember pacing along the quay at South Queensferry, and that particular piece clicking into place. The True Knowledge was born right there, and although its subsequent imaginative application was in a novel about a communist utopia, its immediate context and real-world relevance was to allow me to justify in the most tough-minded manner I could ‘a realistic socialism’, the ‘very moderate social democracy’—and, by extension, movement in the direction of something like Nove’s ‘feasible socialism’—that I in practice support for want of anything more exciting that looks remotely, well, feasible.

So if, as Shalizi suggests, Bowles and Gintis have derived social democracy from premises as bleak as Ellen May Ngwethu’s, the True Knowledge was from the start on more or less the same page as they are, even if Ellen May is not. The complicities of social democracy in the power of ‘their own’ capitalist states can also be explained by the same theory, as Shalzi’s discussion makes clear. Solidarity at a national level can become scabbing (or worse) at an international one.

It’s of course true, as Shalizi indicates, that the insight can also be applied in a narrowly ‘selfish’ way by individuals making their own separate peace with a stronger power. Roisin, in The Execution Channel, does this when it dawns on her that she’s living in an imperial world, and she’s an imperial girl. Likewise Geena in Intrusion, for whom her cynical supervisor’s exposition of academic Critical Theory as the necessary self-consciousness (and equally necessary self-mystification) of a capitalism deliberately sustained for fear of the alternative comes as a personally liberating relief.

Spiral staircases – response to Walton

Jo Walton’s characteristically warm and enthusiastic piece is difficult to respond to with anything but equally warm thanks, which I know isn’t enough. (But thanks, Jo! For this and much else.) Perhaps the most I can do here is give an anecdotal account of how I came up with the structures she anatomises.

Walton, I suspect, guesses right when she identifies Le Guin’s The Dispossessed as the ‘vector of influence’ for the helical structure. But there were two moments of inspiration beyond it, which came long after that classic had impressed me (and its structure impressed itself on my mind).

The first was sheer coincidence. After Iain Banks had revised two of his space operas (their first drafts had been hopefully submitted and serially rejected) and got them published to great acclaim, I tried to persuade him to try the same with another. Use of Weapons —the first Culture novel he wrote—might not be such a hopeless case as he thought. He challenged me to find something salvageable in it. I went through it striking out purple prose, but its main problem couldn’t be blue-pencilled. Thanks to its elaborately contrived structure, the climax to both main strands of the story—and the big expectation-reversing, jump-from-your-chair reveal—happened in the middle of the book.

Around about the same time I happened to read one of E. C. Tubb’s Dumarest novels, the opening line of which was ‘He woke counting seconds’. The star-travelling hero had counted down until the suspended animation kicked in, so finding himself counting forwards told him he’d survived the experience. When Iain came round to see how I was getting on, I suggested out of the blue: Why don’t you tell the ongoing events in chronological order, and the flashbacks in reverse order? And that way …

That was a moment.

Another was when I was planning my second novel. I’d written The Star Fraction with no expectation of writing a sequel. I had no idea what to write next, but the world of the Fall Revolution cried out for further exploration. I suddenly noticed that Jonathan Wilde, who in my first novel appears as a minor character in his nineties, would have been born at roughly the same date as me. So if he was real he’d be alive now, and he could have had the same sort of past as I had. He might even have gone to Glasgow University in the 1970s … and I still had my notes and diaries from that time.

I repeated the trick of taking a minor character from one book and making them central in another with Myra in The Sky Road, as well as the helical structure: in this case, a column-dodging shift to avoid the painful slog of recounting her progress across the continent at the head of the Sheenisov horde, which would have taken a lot of research, and in my hands wouldn’t have made much of a tale anyway.

By the time I wrote my next book, Cosmonaut Keep, the structure had become perhaps too easy a habit, and I haven’t used it since. But it’s a weapon I’ll keep in reserve. And there’s another departure in the Engines of Light books, which I’ll also keep in reserve, for the next section.

Restoration games – response to Harihareswara

The Restoration Game owes a lot more to my real life; and real events than to video games, about which I know next to nothing. It’s an immense relief that Harihareswara, who really does know about video games and tech start-ups from real life, doesn’t just fall about laughing at my notions of what, say, working in a games start-up is like. It’s sobering (and, in terms of understanding how readers have responded to some of my books, useful) to be reminded how far certain events and personalities have moved from common knowledge to obscurity.

I must admit I hadn’t thought of ‘restoration’ as a theme in The Human Front, but now that she’s pointed it out, it seems pervasive. The Human Front is a jeu d’espirit, and may be too slight for the weight of its background story, which is horrific. The novella itself has several origins, or branching timelines in its history, in ‘Aha!’ moments like those I’ve just talked about with Walton. The first, of course, was the idea of an alternate history where the Jonbar point was an entirely mythical event. The second was when I realised, as I gloomily contemplated researching an alternate 1950s and 1960s, that I actually remember almost half the 1950s and all the 1960s (yeah, I wasn’t there) so I could draw on my own memories rather than other people’s memoirs. A third was when I’d written half of it and didn’t know where to go with it, and Iain said: ‘It’s science fiction – you can go anywhere!’ So I did.

Finding you’re a pawn in someone else’s game can be quite a revelation—a reveal, even. And the most shocking reveals are reversals. Spy stories, real-life and fictional, often turn on that sudden re-evaluation of the character’s back-story. (Philby! Of all people!) You think you’re a player, and you find you’re being played.
I had this unsettling experience in October 1999, watching an episode of the BBC series The Spying Game. It dealt with how first the CIA, then the National Endowment for Democracy, had funnelled support to dissidents in Eastern Europe.

‘One route for the NED’s money was Jan Kavan,’ (an exiled Czech dissident from the 1968 generation). ‘He had a special van, built with a secret compartment, in order to smuggle thousands of books and printing machines into Czechoslovakia. […] Kavan was also given thousands of books by the International Literary Centre in New York, which is now known to have been funded directly by the CIA.’

Reader, I was in that van.

How I came to be in it I’ve told elsewhere, but in this context suffice it to say that in all my novels since that moment in 1999 when I learned the laugh was on me, Trotskyists appear in a rather less forgiving light than they do in the Fall Revolution books. A minor character in The Restoration Game makes a disturbing historical speculation that I can by no means endorse, but which makes sense of a lot of things—in the novel’s convoluted back-story and in the real world, from my inconsequent clandestine expedition to the greatest reversal/reveal of our time: the rise of China as a market economy with a Communist government. Perhaps some Soviet oppositionists were playing a longer, deeper and darker game than even Stalin suspected, or any ‘Mexican ice-pick’ could stop; a game that their successors have continued. Behind any screen may be a Black Plan.

In real life, it’s never Game Over till it’s over.

Domestic extremisms – response to Mendlesohn

Farah Mendlesohn has been a perceptive critic of my work for a long time, and a friend for almost as long. She’s one of the few people to whom I could say (as I once did) ‘All the churches in Britain started as parties in the Revolution!’ and be at once understood (and have the hyperbole forgiven). Her identification of the romantic strain—in relation to people and place, urban and rural, natural and industrial—in the novels is acute.
So too is her identification of The Execution Channel as ‘in John Clute’s terms, a narrative of Thinning’. The text aches with the loss of a land. Travis mourns the gradual, almost imperceptible loss of the Britain, and England, in which he grew up, a slow darkening in which ‘the deaths of certain public men, from suicides or heart attacks’ each mark another slat nailed across the window. (That exact image came to my mind that evening at the Glasgow Worldcon in 2005 when I heard from Charlie Stross that Robin Cook had died.)The lost revolution that Roisin grieves is that of England in the seventeenth century and America in the eighteenth. ‘That America had been for nothing: that dismayed her.’

That image too originated in a dark thought of my own, from June 2004:

When the President claims for himself powers outlawed in every country issuing from the English Revolution, and last exercised when James the II & VII personally supervised the splitting of Presbyterian shins, I guess we have to admit that in the long run the English Revolution failed.

Oh well. Freedom can always choose another people.

I fortified myself against despair a day or two later by revisiting a local copy of an early social contract of that revolution, the Scottish National Covenant:

It’s on vellum. You can still see the shape of the lamb. It’s hard to read: the orthography, if not the language, has changed since 1638. It’s harder yet to grasp its significance: the rant against the Roman Antichrist, the intolerance to all outside God’s true church, the professed loyalty to the King’s Majesty are now alien. But some phrases still leap out: ‘a free monarchy’, ‘the fundamental laws, ancient privileges, offices and liberties of this kingdom’, ‘the people’s security of their lands, livings, rights, offices, liberties, and dignities preserved’. The cramped signatures at the foot, of the lord, the councillors, the burgesses and the ministers of Queensferry.

Given the explicit references back to Scottish Calvinism (however transmuted politically and indeed theologically) in four of my five most recent books, I find it hard to agree with Mendlesohn’s contention that:

For those who are self consciously political, the works of MacLeod are engaged in a Romance with Perfectionism. Perfectionism is a Puritan ideology which espouses a trajectory of growing into Grace. It is the antithesis of Calvinism in that it relies on faith through works, a slow, gradual conversion, and an underlying assumption that one can create a kingdom here on earth.

In my own presbyterian upbringing I never heard of Perfectionism, other than passing references to it as a quaint aberration of the Methodists. It certainly has never crossed my mind as a pole in any dialectic in the novels. The romance, when revolution has lost its lustre or its likelihood, is with improvement, with reform, with meliorism. Sandra Hope, like all the other stubborn church ladies (among which I’d include Evangeline, the old Communist) who toil in the backstage of these novels as they so often do in real life, is following (in my mind at least) the injunction to ‘be not weary in well doing’, weary though they often are. The doctrine that self and the world can be improved by good works, and a kingdom built on earth, is entirely mainstream Calvinism.
Nor am I entirely in agreement with Mendlesohn’s reading of my more recent books as more pessimistic than my earlier work, and as foreclosing the long-term prospect of ‘upward and outward’. The republic of heaven is there in The Night Sessions, for the robots at least, and perhaps for us. In The Restoration Game, it’s already been long since reached in the real world (if that world is itself real) and is possible in ours. And it’s all over Descent.

Mendlesohn sheds a very interesting light on Intrusion by arguing for a reading of it as horror rather than romance. (A sudden thought: could one strand be read as a gothic? There’s a husband with a dark secret, an inherited curse, and a family home with a hidden vault. Would Hope’s own version begin:‘Last night I dreamt I went to Miavaig again.’?) My only caveat would be that in authorial intention it followed a more direct genre imperative, that of dystopia. Adult (as opposed to YA) dystopia, I’ve always thought, has to follow the formula: ‘An oppressive system takes on a brave individual—and wins!’

But even in that dystopian text the republic of heaven remains within reach. Space is still being explored. New exoplanets are swimming into focus. The sinister Dr Estraguel tells Geena just how close the world has come to a vast improvement, the moment a majority becomes convinced of its possibility—and therefore, on his cynical take, the urgent necessity of preventing the population from realising the possibility.

Mendlesohn is more right in her postscript than she allows herself to be. The novels aren’t parts of a future history, but they share a secret history of the future, inspired by historical materialism. Dr Estraguel’s diagnosis was put forward much earlier by another cynic, Dave Reid in The Stone Canal:

‘We’re the camp of the revolution […] Because your Yank dingbat libertarian pals are right—the Western democracies are socialist! Big public sectors, big companies that plan production while officially everything’s on the market … sort of black planning, like the East had a black market. Marx said universal suffrage was the rule of the working class, and he was right. The West is Red!’

The Black Plan is imaginary, but black planning—non-market allocation within capitalism—is not. If it were ever to be combined with democracy and liberty, we would have socialism or something like it. The more or less rapid transformation of the entire immense superstructure may be rather less rapid than than some of us have hoped or expected, but as one Hegelian Marxist wryly put it; ‘The Absolute is not in a hurry.’
Nor am I, but I still think we’ll make it to the ships.

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Thanks for this response and the preceding posts. I’ve wanted to comment on this series as it was being posted, but personal issues intervened (as well as that I haven’t really studied MacLeod’s works: I’m presently writing about Adam Roberts as I have time).

So, some general metacomments:

1. Black Planning is most visibly seen in the energy sector, for which people in government have to go to great lengths to pretend that the market or capitalism really has any major effect beyond being a vehicle for cronyism. This is also the most important sector right now because of the afore-mentioned global warming crisis. This is why I think that a whole lot of well-meaning left-liberal of social democratic economics about energy is kind of misdirected insofar as it focusses on whether renewable energy is “cheaper” than fossil or nuclear ignoring externalities: no one really builds a major energy-producing facility because of market-driven decisions.

2. There’s a lot of confusion about what’s what along the left-right axis, whether someone is “moving right” when they take libertarianism seriously, and so on. (I may be confused myself: I had thought that “libertarianism” was bring used in its European sense of “left anarchism”, not its U.S. one of “propertarianism”). But in any case we live in an age of failure. Left-liberalism, social democracy, and the various Marxist projects all have failed in theory and practice: the radical reaction on the right is aggressive, but hardly widely successful, and we’re left with a kind of neoliberalism that no widely based group of people really thinks is working. In this territory all of the fringe beliefs blend together, and it’s not surprising to me that the conversations spoken of are between Trots and libertarians, or that an obscure early-20th-century egoist can become a major influence. I think it’s more honest for people who think about this (as opposed to politicians who have to make day-to-day decisions) to acknowledge this failure and participate in this kind of radical loss of structure.

Rich I was just reading about how the fossil fuel sector gets trillions of dollars in subsidies, not including military spending.
A question for Ken, how come the Sheenisov lost to the Greens in Skyward? Seems to me they had a distinct technical advantage, or were they only a puppet of that A.I.?

SimonH – they didn’t lose in combat, but they lost the race to become the successor system. The implication is that what Myra took from her discussion with Se-Ha in Chapter 14 (that the Sheenisov had to expand at just the right speed, not too slow or too fast, and that if they found themselves pushing at an open door they’d fall flat on their faces) actually happened when Myra’s migration, the fall of the Net and the loss of space access combined to bring about the collapse of the West before they expected it. The Greens/barb took the cities, and the Sheenisov advance ran into the sand.

I’m not saying that I dislike the results of actually existing social democracies, but they are not being adopted elsewhere or holding their gains, nor can they defend their ideology against neoliberalism.

“I’m not saying that I dislike the results of actually existing social democracies, but they are not being adopted elsewhere or holding their gains, nor can they defend their ideology against neoliberalism.”

I would argue that this isn’t a problem with social democracy so much as a problem with the corrupt media and “Thinktanks” controlled by powerful right wing interests. Social democracy when implemented works. It is also extremely popular with the public. So the question becomes, how do we implement it?

I would argue that this isn’t a problem with social democracy so much as a problem with the corrupt media and “Thinktanks” controlled by powerful right wing interests. Social democracy when implemented works. It is also extremely popular with the public. So the question becomes, how do we implement it?

It’s a real problem if your political system can’t survive its enemies, IMO. And I say this as someone who admires generous social democracy a lot. Expecting a political system to be excused from the chore of its own continuation is not realistic. It reminds me of apologists for the USSR trying to blame all its problems on enemies of the revolution — as if revolutions don’t always have enemies — or anarcho-capitalists trying to fence off all horrific outcomes by saying nothing bad will happen if everyone behaves ethically. Yeah, Libertopia won’t turn into a slave state as long as nobody is ethically debased enough to make slave contracts. I’m sure history offers a lot of reassurance there.

It’s really hard for me to tell what is popular with the public. Changed wording referring to the same policies can get dramatically different results on polls. It suggests to me that large parts of the public have very malleable commitments. Or maybe they don’t try to reason in a principled self-consistent way so they don’t contradict themselves from one pollster to the next. Trying to figure out the public’s “real” values setting aside organized persuasion is a bit like trying to set public health policy assuming that every environment is as sterile as an operating room.

I’d agree that calling social democracy a failure is premature. And the battle is never really over: there’s no political development so wonderful or so horrible that a later generation can no longer make things better or worse. There’s no point in the river of history where you can stay in one place without swimming.

on the response to Farrell—Notions that selfish genes or game theory can “explain” a child smiling at a parent as a strategy for reproduction absurd. None of this is needed to explain why for untold centuries children were deemed workforce, warriors and retirement system. Yet selfish genes and game theory don’t even attempt to explain why the child usually has feelings in addition to a smile reflex. Crackbrained twaddle chosen for its intrinsic appeal to the author, I think.

As for the calculation problem, I think the onus is upon the people who take this seriously to give an account of how market prices provide sufficient information to properly distribute labor and goods to satisfy human needs and wants on a sustainable basis. Or at least to explain how there isn’t a calculation problem for capitalism. Good luck with that.

on the response to Shalizi—Knowledge about the world is attained by the experience of changing the world. Knowledge hence is a collective enterprise. So much for the True Knowledge’s claims to be knowledge. An individual rationalist model of reality that, like Spinoza’s, surreptitiously swipes it axioms from the best scientific knowledge and social experience the modeler can acquire, has its place in the interrogation of nature, to be sure. But it’s not the thing itself.

It is striking that an imaginative writer misses the fascist aesthetic in Heinlein’s invocation of the power of the Rods and the Axe. Yes, irony is a thing…and so is false irony.

And I still say that New Mars is Galt’s Gulch reimagined to be cool.

on the response to Harihareswara—I must insist that Restoration Games should be compared to Banks’ Surface Detail as well.

As for the discovery that Trotskyism of a certain kind really was counterrevolutionary? I’m sure this was every bit as shocking as the discovery that endorsing imperialism in a referendum led to a Tory triumph at the polls. Really there’s nothing to do but get over a false self-identification as a leftist.

on the response to Mendelsohn—“The lost revolution that Roisin grieves is that of England in the seventeenth century and America in the eighteenth. ‘That America had been for nothing: that dismayed her.’” The great social revolution in America was called the Civil War, not the American Revolution. Roisin is merely grieved that a political fancy demands a social base, and is not an act of individual will.

Equally, black planning is as fictional as the notion that China is a market economy with a communist government. Market economies are cyclical. Black planning is not production for use or the abolition of classes.

In tribute to the MacLeod seminar, since my Fall books are buried in boxes in the attic, I’m re-reading Atlas Shrugged. I mentally replace John Galt with “David Reid.”

Steven I think it’s best to look at black planning as analogous to the actions of the bourgeoise under feudalism. Serfdom was the main game but slowly and surely a new system was being built up that increasingly clashed with the feudal model.

It’s as funny to watch as it’s futile for a writer of fiction to dispute a reader’s reading — the Death of the Author meeting the one-star Amazon review in an acrimonious time-sink dust-up in the comments — but as for reasons best known to yourself you’ve chosen to make this a personal and political attack and (in an epic fail of taste) garnished it with a tawdry surmise about the feelings of a friend now dead, I’m left with little choice and no compunction.

It took me a while to find the thread on which several bizarre misreadings are strung, but at length my fingernail snagged on this: ‘Roisin is merely grieved that a political fancy demands a social base, and is not an act of individual will.’ The thread is the supposition that I have, in my ‘ever speedier trajectory to the right’ since at the latest 1998, embraced with increasing fervour an ever-more frantic individualism as a theory of politics, society, ethics, and knowledge.

So, Roisin. What she’s dismayed about, as the context (both in the book and in my post above) makes clear, is that one of the gains of the bourgeois revolution has, in late imperialism, been discarded quite openly and without effective opposition. At the sight of the Bass Rock, where Covenanter preachers were imprisoned and tortured, ‘Tears sprang to her eyes, as they always did when the thought struck her that that particular prerogative was back: the right of the sovereign to condemn, to put to the question, without due process and for reasons of state; that on that sore point all the Revolutions in Britain and America had been for nothing. That America had been for nothing: that dismayed her.’

A few pages later, we find her on a beach, gazing on surfers, oil tankers and jet fighters:

‘From the Leuchars shore [i.e. at the site of her peace-protest camp] she’d seen many a similar scene. She’d sometimes thought it would make the perfect snapshot of imperialism: the resource hauled, the force projected, the way of life protected, innocent in its enjoyment, guilty in its ignorance. Surfers, tankers, jet fighters: she could have made a postcard of it, and send a copy to every one of the billions on the other side of the equation. Having a lovely time. Wish you were here. Most of the recipients would wish they were here; none more, perhaps, than some of the millions mobilised in the states that had broken away, to claw themselves collectively upward in a painful high-acceleration burn to what they hoped was a different orbit.
Now she saw it differently.’

She’s already made her choice, for the state in which she lives and against those conscripted into making the painful steep ascent; a choice soon rewarded by the sight of her brother’s torture and murder, and not long afterwards by her own encounter with the sharp edge of that same sovereign prerogative whose revival had so distressed her.

I could go on. I could linger over the absurdity of supposing that a (fictitious) socialist philosophy cobbled together by prisoners in an anarcho-capitalist labour camp from ‘the works of Stirner, Nietzsche, Marx, Engels, Dietzgen, Darwin, and Spencer’ and ‘from their own bitter experiences’ would not be self-understood from the start as a collective enterprise and would be an ‘individual rationalist model of reality’. I could point up the instances in most if not all my recent novels in which the key insight into what’s going on comes from a minor and marginal character, sometimes even a character who’s a fiction within the fiction. I could highlight passages of bitter sarcasm in most of these novels about the collusion of Labour (and similar) parties with imperialism:

‘She managed a café – smoke-free of course, but also sugar-free, fat-free, caffeine-free and salt-free – in Seven Sisters Road, just opposite Finsbury Park Station. Her two children, both New Kids and thriving with it, attended the school where the meetings were held. Her husband dropped the kids off and picked them up, made their breakfasts and their dinners, and minded the house with more or less competence, in between co-ordinating from the front room a vast, unending camera-drone operation over Peru, allegedly for some coalition of development and human rights NGOs but (Hope had long suspected) actually wirelessed in to the ongoing counter-insurgency: fingering suspects to death-squads, targeting airstrikes on peasant villages. In short, an ideal Labour family.’

‘Hope still hated the Party, hated it from the very marrow of her bones. She could look at its banners and badges and see behind them cells of hooded, shackled men, and cold bodies covered with cement dust in sudden ruins, and naked people burning under green rainforest canopies.’

But what would be the point? Perhaps it’s all just part of my ‘false self-identification as a leftist’, which I should ‘get over’.

“I could highlight passages of bitter sarcasm in most of these novels about the collusion of Labour (and similar) parties with imperialism”

Yes. I tried mentioning something like this above, but — ‘leftism’ consists of Keep Hope Alive at this point. We’re not supposed to say that the current forms of the left have failed, only that the people have failed the left because the people don’t know their own minds. Mentioning failure is by definition rightist defeatism.

Yes, I am sorry about my reaction to The Quarry. There are some wild flights of fancy that should stay buried. My apologies.

If I recall correctly, there is a brief scene in Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine in which one of the sons, seemingly out of nowhere, comments that he is not pleased. It is good to know that Tamburlaine is a denunciation of the Tudor monarchy’s claim power was given to them by God (Jove.) Marlowe of course had to be circumspect.

I initially assumed New Mars was a viciously funny satire of Texas, or something. (That’s the society in the middle of the wormhole in The Cassini Division, right? That’s the first one I read.). I may be wrong so far as authorial intention is concerned, but then that’s my hobbyhorse at CT, the impossibility of Cross-Atlantic understanding of sociological metaphors.

Despite my own disagreements with steven I’ll add that he has a point about New Mars. Well to be honest I have already criticized the benign treatment of children that occurred in that libertaria. I would add that the lack of a social safety net should be more problematic then it is in the book.
To be fair my biases do lead me to believe that the likely outcome of any anarcho-capitalist experiment can best be demonstrated by the Bioshock game.

If you read the passages I referred to as ‘out of nowhere’, apropos of nothing, rather than as integral to making sense of the plots of the books and the motivations of the characters … well, it’s a reading, I suppose.

Bianca Steele and SimonH — New Mars is neither a satire (of Texas or anywhere else) nor an entirely serious attempt at a libertaria, with all institutions researched and bullet-proofed against objections (including my own). Lots of features were probably pick-pocketed from some passing libertarian pamphlet and thrown in the mix to add a splash of colour here and there. I’ve completely forgotten about how children feature in it, and I don’t have time to re-read the two novels at the moment, so a chapter reference would be gratefully received.

Well based from comments made there are those who think you gave socialism and libertarianism both a fair go. That may well have been your intention I of course am pro-socialist and anti-libertarian so my comments come from that perspective. Of course the New Martians did almost get everyone enslaved so there’s that against them, although I believe someone here did call it an honest mistake on the libertarians part.
Sorry I can’t find my Fall Revolution books but as memory serves children in New Mars have only one form of labour, that of media commentators. Personally I think that adults would usurp them in their jobs and then they would face less pleasant forms of employment.

They are a functioning socialist society that is by far the more virtuous society (from the perspective of at least anyone on the left) of any examined in the fall series – with the possible exception of in Skyroad. It is even pointed out that they end up acting in a moral and self-sacrificing fashion by Reid at the end: Reid quips “what are socialists for?” after pointing out how the Solar Union would have been better off letting the Jovians run rampant up the Malley Mile. Of course, Reid’s statement, if not Reid himself, misconstrues the interests of the Solar Union. It is possible for your interests to be the outcomes of others – acting for the benefit of others can be in accordance with the true knowledge even in the absence of the potential for reciprocal action.

This quip of Reid lays the ground for the closing shot, Ellen May sitting out in the belt building a new socialist society. This has two functions, one aesthetic the other emotive. The aesthetic is symmetry – now both the socialist and the libertarian societies have the seeds of the other growing within them. Yin and Yang, a speck of darkness growing within the light of the Solar Union counterpoised by a speck of light growing in the darkness surrounding New Mars. The emotive function is to not leave the book on a note of victory for the capitalists, the smug complacency of Reid and company is look set for a fall – which warmed my heart if not yours.

I find it hard to see how one might misconstrue Macleod’s vision of the Solar Union so strangely. It is as if you had decided for some reason Macleod was not ‘proper left’ and were looking to confirm this prejudice. This is certainly compatible with the rest of your interpretations so at odds with every one else’s. The bitterness of the vitriol spewed – for which there was a half-heartedly apology and a, I hope, half hearted, acceptance – is also in line with this explanation. On that note, a decent person would spend some time thinking on how despicable their behaviour was and cultivating a sense of shame.